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Gain in money or goods; profit; riches; -- often in an ill sense. The lust of lucre and the dread of death. Pope.

Gainful; profitable. [Obs.] Boyle.

Producing profit; gainful. [Obs.]

To gain, as the result of one's efforts; to get, as profit; to make acquisition of; to have accrue or happen to one; as, to make a large profit; to make an error; to make a loss; to make money. He accuseth Neptune unjustly who makes shipwreck a second time. Bacon.

A vain, unprofitable discourse or inquiry. [R.]

Any unprofitable science. [Obs.]

Hence: Moved by considerations of pay or profit; greedy of gain; sordid; selfish. Shak. For God forbid I should my papers blot With mercenary lines, with servile pen. Daniel.

To acquire desert; to gain value; to receive benefit; to profit. [Obs.] Beau. & Fl.

nderstood to be the whole process preceding the execution. Blackstone. Burrill. -- Mesne profits, profits of premises during the time the owner has been wrongfully kept out of the possession of his estate. Burrill.

To draw anything from, as if by milking; to compel to yield profit or advantage; to plunder. Tyndale. They [the lawyers] milk an unfortunate estate as regularly as a dairyman does his stock. London Spectator. To milk the street, to squeeze the smaller operators in stocks and extract a profit from them, by alternately r…

One of two equal parts; a half; as, a moiety of an estate, of goods, or of profits; the moiety of a jury, or of a nation. Shak. The more beautiful moiety of his majesty's subject. Addison.

f a transaction; cash. -- To make money, to gain or acquire money or property; to make a profit in dealings.

Affording profitable returns; lucrative; as, a money-making business.

ign matter, as boxes, coverings, wraps, etc.; free from charges, deductions, etc; as, net profit; net income; net weight, etc. [Less properly written nett.] Net tonnage (Naut.), the tonnage of a vessel after a deduction from the gross tonnage has been made, to allow space for crew, machinery, etc.

A medicine, the ingredients of which are kept secret for the purpose of restricting the profits of sale to the inventor or proprietor; a quack medicine.

d to the imagination or memory. There doth not occur to me any use of this experiment for profit. Bacon.

To deal in stocks or any commodity with a view to speculative profits. [Brokers' Cant]

To turn out (profitably or unprofitably); to result; to develop; as, the investigation, or the speculation, panned out poorly. [Slang, U. S.]

d skill, or any or all of them, under an understanding that there shall be a communion of profit between them, and for the purpose of carrying on a legal trade, business, or adventure. Kent. Story.

Hence, to make or secure suitable return for expense or trouble; to be remunerative or profitable; to be worth the effort or pains required; as, it will pay to ride; it will pay to wait; politeness always pays. To pay for. (a) To make amends for; to atone for; as, men often pay for their mistakes with loss of property…